One issue that many businesses face is the need to obtain information about the status of equipment. This issue applies to many different kinds of commercial equipment. Merely by way of example, some organizations need to obtain status information (e.g., current location, maintenance status, etc.) about vehicles (e.g., in a commercial fleet). Other organizations might need to determine whether unattended equipment is operating normally (or at all). In other cases, even attended equipment might need to convey status information remotely; for example, if an operator of the equipment does not have the ability or incentive to report information about the status of the equipment (for example, if the equipment is leased to the operator).
In the past, obtaining status information about equipment was a labor-intensive process that generally involved travel to the location of the equipment and manual inspection of the equipment. As many types of equipment gained processing power, the accumulation of status information about the equipment became more automated, but the collection of that information often remain difficult, especially for equipment located in remote locations. Some equipment manufacturers developed proprietary communication hardware and/or protocols for conveying status information remotely, but in multivendor environments, these disparate strategies often prove unworkable.
More recently, especially in the field of information technology, there have been movements toward standardizing the communication of status information. One example of such a movement is the simple network management protocol (“SNMP”), which is commonly used to convey status information about network equipment. Even such standards, however, generally are limited in application to information technology equipment, and they often require significant infrastructure (such as network monitors and the like) in order to convey status information from a piece of equipment to the ultimate consumer of such information (which might be a user, a back office system, and/or the like).
Thus, there is a need for new tools and techniques to provide for the conveyance of status information from a wide variety of different types of commercial equipment to a consumer of such information.